Vocabulary test errors made by people with varying levels of vocabulary knowledge might give information about the stages involved in learning a word's meaning. A study used such data to evaluate Johnson O'Connor's proposal that word learning involves four stages and that each stage is characterized by a type of confusion (a mislead). In the first or "look alike" stage, people tend to confuse a word with other words similar in sound or appearance, while in the second or "context" stage, people tend to confuse a word with others in the same setting. In the third stage, one might have a greater knowledge of word meaning, but confuse it with its exact opposite, or antonym. The last or close stage would involve fine shades of meanings of a word. Subjects were 326 adults who took a 150-item vocabulary test that included examples of each of the four O'Connor categories. The results showed only a small degree of relationship between mislead categories and vocabulary level, and did not support the O'Connor proposal regarding the way misleads are ordered. (FL)